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Syria ceasefire deal in balance

The US and Russian Federation say they’ll extend the Syrian ceasefire a further 48 hours.

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State department spokesman Mark Toner said yesterday that “we’ve seen violations on both sides” in Syria, although the ceasefire is broadly holding.

He said the Syrian government had not provided the necessary “facilitation letters”, or permits, to allow the aid convoys to reach opposition areas, disappointing even Russian Federation, the Syrian president’s key backer. These divisions boiled to the surface previously over President Barack Obama’s failure to use greater military might to enforce his demand that Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad relinquish power and, in particular, in September 2013, after the U.S. backed down from its threat to carry out a “shock-and-awe” assault on Damascus over the trumped up charge that the Assad government had used chemical weapons against civilians.

“It’s hard to get the opposition to go along with something that they suspect and know that the regime will take advantage of to find a military solution to the conflict”, says Andrew Tabler, a Syria expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Peace.

Staffan de Mistura said that no United Nations humanitarian aid trucks have yet moved across the Turkish border into Syria.

According to a report published Wednesday in the New York Times, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter first gave voice to the military’s opposition last week during a conference call in which Secretary of State Kerry was advocating acceptance of the agreement with Russian Federation.

“We also call on all parties with influence over the Syrian regime to ensure all measures are taken to immediately facilitate access for United Nations humanitarian convoys”, he said.

The deal, struck by International Syria Support Group co-chairs United States and Russian Federation, is to be renewed every 48 hours.

UN Special Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura told reporters Tuesday in Geneva that the UN was still waiting for an authorization from the Syrian government to deliver aid.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which monitors the Syrian conflict through contacts on the ground, said no deaths from fighting had been reported in the first 48 hours of the truce.

Aid agencies have said they need reassurances from both government and opposition groups to use the road to deliver aid. The U.N. estimates about a quarter million people are trapped inside.

By evening yesterday, there were no reports of major violations of the agreement, which calls on all parties to hold their fire, allowing only for airstrikes against the extremist Islamic State group and al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, known as Jabhat Fatah al-Sham.

The initial focus of the aid deliveries is Aleppo, Syria’s former economic hub in the north of the country, which has been decimated by five years of war. “And if this agreement fails, the Syrian air force will know where to go to kill all of those rebels that we’ve been supporting”. “I would say there have been a number of occasions where we’ve seen what appear to be steps forward and sadly it hasn’t been possible to implement them, but I hope that this will be different this time”.

“The Russian Federation is agreeing with us”, he said.

“That is what makes a difference for the people, apart from seeing no more bombs or mortar shelling taking place”, he said of the aid deliveries that are supposed to be part of the truce deal. But since it began on Monday, no civilians have been killed in the areas it covers, according to one monitoring group. He vowed again on Monday to win back the entire country, which has been splintered into areas controlled by the state, an array of rebel factions, the Islamic State group, and the Kurdish YPG militia.

In the short term, all sides stop fighting and allow the establishment of a humanitarian corridor into eastern Aleppo, which is now besieged by government forces.

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Elsewhere in the province, an airstrike on the IS-held town of Mayadeen killed at least nine people and wounded dozens, according to opposition activists and Deir el-Zour 24, an activist collective.

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